Alison -- not sure if it's moralism, perhaps so -- but in any case, a
misunderstanding isn't any less negative simply because it's productive;
it's the Hegelian catch-all clause, -positive untruth-; I don't argue that
what he thought stopped him writing good poems, just that those poems (and
the prose more conspicuously) were rhapsodic to a key fault: no dialectic.
If we define myth as inherently dialectical, as we might, then by virtue
of that definition Olson is a dialectician -- but by no other virtue, and
at the cost of suppressing the evidence of his own manifest reflective
tendencies and outright statements.
A good counterexample could be (eg) Kevin Nolan's _All Over Susan_: would
anyone agree? I don't think Olson could ever have been able to comprehend
that agility exactly.
Best, k
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